Johannesburg - Police and Prison Civil Rights Union (Popcru) top brass will be in Cape Town from on Thursday to get first-hand information about the state of affairs at the Bishop Lavis Training College.
This comes after video footage surfaced about two weeks ago, showing a group of police trainees eating out of a refuse bin at the college.
It showed female and male trainees dressed in police-issue tracksuits standing around the bin, scavenging through waste, in a bid to salvage food they were ordered to dump.
Trainees also complained that their living quarters were sprayed with teargas or pepper spray, which made several trainees sick and led to one trainee being taken to hospital.
It is standing rules are that cadets may not bring perishable food back to the college after a weekend break, and trainees say instructors forced them to dump the food they had brought with them.
But Popcru’s provincial chairman, Francisco Fields, said there was no excuse for what happened.
“There is no training value in firing teargas into empty rooms with the sole malicious purpose of causing severe discomfort.”
Fields said they had received a pile of complaints from trainees who claimed they were victimised and intimidated at the college by instructors abusing their powers.
- The Star